Miles from Nowhere

by Nami Mun

  “Yeah,” I told him. “I snuck into it and saw it five times. It was great.”

  He spritzed the Binaca twice. Just like him, the car was too clean. Nothing on the dash, nothing in the back except two bags of groceries. I told him his car was boring. He didn’t laugh or anything, just said, “Oh yeah?” and kept driving. Even his plaid shirt and his pants looked like they’d just been ironed. Through the speakers, Irene Cara sang, I’m gonna live forever. I’m gonna learn how to fly. I turned up the volume and noticed dangling on the tuner knob a small cross with a pretty silver Jesus.

  “How old are you anyway?” he asked, fixing the rear-view mirror.

  I plucked the cross, looked at it, felt the tiny bump of a nail in his feet. “I don’t know, how old you want me to be?”

  He took the cross from my hands and dropped it in his shirt pocket.

  “You look like you could be my daughter’s age.”

  The car made a turn. I could see the motel sign halfway down the block. “Is that who you want me to be?” I said and leaned in, my chin on his shoulder, my hand on his leg.

  “Sure,” he said, looking at the road. “You can be my kid.”

  With a Boy

  I lived on the sixth floor of an abandoned building with a boy who worked, like me. Blue Fly, with his sunny hair and pool-blue eyes, sold himself mostly. He stayed away for days, one time a whole week, and he almost always came back with money and a boil somewhere on his body. When he wasn’t hooking or shooting heroin, he snuck clothes out of Laundromats and sold them on sidewalks miles away with a cardboard poster that said: GARAGE SALE, MOVING TO ALASKA. He stole everything, all the time, and the closer we got, the more he stole from me. He had a thing for keys, and my money. But being with him was easy, and once in a while we loved each other as if God himself had taught us how.

  But then the accident happened. He was on the floor, cooking his spoon over the Sterno can, and I was mad because he’d said there was only enough for him—that half would do neither of us any good. He tapped his favorite vein, the one he called the Great Wall of China, and I kicked the Sterno out from under him. He should’ve moved, most people would’ve, but he was so focused on his arm, so stubborn about rolling his eyes backwards and falling into the rush, he didn’t care about the small fire clinging to his leg. His back sloped against the wall. His eyes turned to worms. I stood there watching him nodding and half-swatting his calf before realizing that maybe I should help.

  At the hospital, under the white lights and in front of a pretty nurse with tired eyes, Blue Fly spit in my face. His leg was wet-bandaged and slung up by the ankle, and the nurse was touching his knee in a way I didn’t much like. Then Blue called me a useless stupid cunt. I was relieved that he was finally talking to me, but instead of saying that, I punched him in the stomach and called him a faggot junkie. “You sell your asshole,” I screamed, which made the nurse hold her hands up at me. “That’s it, visiting hour’s over,” she said, pushing me out the door. I told her she should hold on to her keys.

  In the hallway I walked past a line of beds lumped with sick people, their gowns too thin to hide their fears. I wasn’t bothered by the honesty of it all. My mom worked as a midnight nurse at a very busy hospital. Once when I was young, I asked her what she did for a living. She told me she saved people she didn’t care about.

  That night, I slept on the train until a cop poked me with his stick. I got up, said sorry to his baton, and switched trains, then switched again, until it finally turned morning. At rush hour, I started work as usual.

  Me, I didn’t sell myself anymore—I sold newspapers. Not like a paper route where you hopped on your bike at six in the morning, but like fishing out pages from the trash can and selling them on the trains when metro cops weren’t looking. The key was to screen the pages good, make sure there weren’t any coffee blots or footprints. It was a job. I didn’t beg. Panhandling was for losers.

  On good days, I’d make eight or ten bucks and sometimes people handed money over without even taking a page, maybe thinking their donation would keep their kids from turning out like me.

  After picking through a few bins I stepped into a packed car. The morning was hot and gluey, and people on the train looked to be heading to a funeral, their heads too heavy for their shoulders. Even the air felt thicker, harder to swallow. I held up a page and squeezed between sweating bodies, my elbow rubbing against the backs of business suits, selling news about Mark David Chapman’s sentencing. “Gets twenty-years-to-life,” I yelled, over the train noise. No one looked up. “Reads Catcher in the Rye in court,” I said, tapping the page, but still nobody heard me. A chill spread up my neck and behind my ears, making me salivate. My stomach cramped. I hadn’t had a hit in two days—if you don’t count shooting up water—and my body felt invaded by electric eels. Looking for more space, I moved to the back. “Love pulled the trigger,” I said, under my breath, suddenly wanting to give up everything I’d ever known for an empty seat, or to see Blue. In my head I spelled out his name, over and over, but then wasn’t sure if I’d been talking out loud. The car smelled of cooked cheese. The weight of others kept me standing as I closed my eyes and imagined giant hands wringing my body clean. It had been a while since I’d taken a day off. I thought about playing hooky, maybe taking a trip out to the ocean. I could take the train there and ride like a regular passenger, like everybody else, except I’d smile at people and pretend I was their summer sun.

  I threw up in the station bathroom. It splattered everywhere, some of it hitting the toilet water and splashing back onto my face. I rinsed off in one of those sinks that had a single faucet you pushed to get water, making it impossible to wash your face using both hands. With my shirtsleeve I wiped off a mirror tagged with so much graffiti I couldn’t see any of me.

  Later that day, while working near the token booth, I saw them. The nurse from the hospital, with Blue Fly. They passed me and didn’t even notice. She had her arm around him, and even though they were a few people ahead of me, I could tell he wasn’t limping anymore. The bitch nurse had healed his leg already. I couldn’t stand the thought of Blue going to this woman’s home. All this time I’d thought he only did men, old ugly men with warts on their fingers, but now I saw he’d been cheating on me all along. From her he’d get money, food, new clothes, and who knew what else, maybe even a car. She probably had a pool. Under the exit sign, she stopped to run her fingers through his hair, just above the back of his neck. That’s when I decided to follow them.

  Outside, the sun was so bright you couldn’t even see it, and the heat dried the blood in my veins, making me want to dig them out with my fingernails. But I was freezing, too. I hugged myself and sweated and followed them anyway, down a busy street dotted with garbage bags, a quieter street bouncing with a game of stickball, a block of skinny houses, a row of hedges, then into a short driveway lined with potted plants. And it wasn’t until I found a safe spot behind a tree in her backyard that I realized that the boy wasn’t Blue. He was actually someone I’d never seen in my life. His hair wasn’t even blond. Through the sliding glass doors, I watched the nurse talking to this boy, who I now guessed was her son, although she looked too young to be his mother. They talked for a while as she opened and closed the refrigerator door, setting food on the counter. I imagined their conversation to be very boring.

  Then for no good reason the boy came outside. I ducked down behind the tree.

  “Hello?” His voice came closer. “Who’s there?”

  Closing my eyes seemed like the thing to do.

  “Hello?” he said again, and I made myself smaller, squeezing my eyes tighter. “I’m standing right in front of you, you know.”

  A tall skinny boy who wasn’t more than twelve stood in front of me, all right, holding a Rubik’s Cube. I couldn’t believe I’d thought he was Blue.

  “Mom! There’s an Oriental girl in our yard! Mom!”

  I thought about telling him that I was at the wrong house but decided t
o just head for the gate. It was too late, though. The nurse came out, dish towel over one shoulder. Tilting her head, she tried to remember me, tried to place me between good and evil.

  “I think she’s a street person, Mom.”

  “Alex, please.”

  “Well, she could be. Maybe she doesn’t speak English,” he said, and shouted, “Are—you—home—less?”

  In a strange way, I liked the way he was talking to me. He was so interested, like I was a science project he truly believed in. I didn’t say a word, though, afraid I might break the spell.

  “Maybe we should bring her in,” he said.

  In the shower, I uncapped all the different shampoos the nurse owned and sniffed each and every one of them. One was called Monterey Mist. Another, Australian Kiwi. The smells made me hungry. I was getting ready to lather up the washcloth when a hand poked through the curtains.

  “Here,” she said, handing me a kitchen sponge. “You can use this.”

  I took it, held it flat in my hand, wondered if it was new or little used or if any of that mattered. The sponge made me think of something that had happened on a train a while back. A woman had sat staring up at me in a way I was sure was rude. She had dry hair and small bird eyes and was wearing a T-shirt that said #1 Nana in glitter paint. I’d decided she was an unhappy person. But not knowing what to make of her really, I asked if she wanted a page.

  She said nothing and kept staring.

  “They’re today’s pages,” I told her, and showed her one, but her eyes wouldn’t blink. I wanted to snap her head off.

  “You can’t die from talking to me,” I whispered to her, and as if someone had put coins into her slot, her face cringed. I was winning. She was going to speak, her lips were going to move and she was going to talk to me as if I were a real person, and I was ready to prove to her that she wasn’t better, just better off.

  “You smell,” she said.

  The nurse had put out a shirt, hospital pants, and mismatched socks on top of the toilet seat. Without drying off I jumped into the clothes and wiped the steam off the mirror so I could see the new me. The hair was tangled and everything fit a little loose, but I wished Blue was there.

  In the kitchen she stood over the stove, stirring ketchup into a pan of meat.

  “Hi,” I said, from the other side of the counter.

  “Christ, you scared me.”

  I apologized.

  The light above her drew tired shadows on her face. I wanted to thank her right then, to tell her that no stranger had ever been this good to me, but then we both sort of looked away and the moment turned old. She pulled out a bottle from the freezer and made herself a drink.

  “Where’s your kid?” I asked.

  “He’s at the neighbor’s.”

  “Oh.”

  She took a sip and folded her arms. “How was the shower?”

  “Good.”

  “That’s good,” she said.

  “The shampoos were real nice.”

  She rearranged a magnet on the fridge. “Oh, you used those? Good. I’m glad.”

  “How’s Blue Fly?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “My boyfriend. At the hospital.”

  “Oh. That’s where I know you from. You’re . . . what’s his face . . . Walter’s friend.”

  I didn’t think she deserved to know his real name.

  “He’s good,” she said. “At least when I left him he was.”

  On the side of the fridge hung a calendar of famous nurses. That month was Miss Dorothea Dix, a Civil War nurse. “You know my mom’s a—”

  I stopped talking because the woman dumped her drink into a blender and pushed a button, and then another.

  “Look, I’d ask you to stay for dinner but... I’m sorry, did you say something?”

  “That’s okay. I’m actually not that hungry. I should get going,” I said, opening the sliding glass door.

  “Hey, how about some money?” She looked around the kitchen. “Do you want some money?” From under the counter she pulled out a Yellow Pages and opened it to a section stuffed with bills. “Shit. I only have six dollars.”

  I told her it was okay, that I didn’t want any.

  “What’re you talking about?” She put the six bucks on the counter between us, and I noticed that her hand was shaking. “I’d give you more, but who the hell knows where my purse is,” she said, her hand clutching a clump of her bangs. “My whole life was in there.”

  After I left the woman’s house, I went to the hospital where my mother worked. From behind a bush I watched cars pull up the circular driveway and carry the sick home. The cherry light on top of an ambulance spun in the dark and the hospital windows turned black, one by one, as I waited for almost an hour. It was close to midnight when my mom finally came. I only saw her a few seconds—killing the cigarette on the sidewalk, brushing something off her uniform before walking through the automatic doors and then down a green striped hallway. She hadn’t changed much since I had left her almost three years ago—her hair was still short, still blunt, still black. But maybe it was somebody else. It could’ve been. I don’t know.

  Blue was asleep when I got home that night. I reached up and turned on the flashlight he’d rigged so it hung from the ceiling. The floor turned into a pale yellow egg, and the light made pretty everything it touched—an open can of ravioli, the bandage just below his knee, a green leather purse. He’d fallen asleep in his underwear, the gear still in his arm. I knelt down and pulled it out as slowly as I could, but it wasn’t easy—his skin and pus had dried around the needle. “I knew you’d come back,” he said with a sleepy smile. I loved him so much then. “Anything left for me?” I asked. He pushed himself up slowly and kissed me on the lips. “Yeah,” he said, and I leaned back against the wall, feeling my new clean body sink through the plaster as he rolled up my sleeve and placed his arm under mine. “That all right?” he asked, tightening the belt, finding the right notch, flicking the needle, then smoothing the skin on my arm, up and down—always so good at tracing my wire, always so good at taking me home. I closed my eyes and thought about the mother and the son and the tree and the train, and how one day could expand into a lifetime, then shrink again into one single moment.

  “Ready?” Blue asked, and pushed before I could answer.

  Avon

  At night I used to ride the ferry back and forth, from the city to Staten Island. I’d watch the diamond lights smearing the wet window glass or stand out on the windy deck as the regulars sat crooked, drinking their pints and shouting about different kinds of loss. The engine shook my legs. The water pricked my skin. I stood on the railing and let the wind sting my eyes and tickle my veins where a warm drug bubbled through, heating up like the wires of an electric blanket. I was sixteen and pregnant then, thinking that the ups and downs of the East River would kill it somehow.

  But that was at night.

  During the day, I was an Avon Lady. I washed up, combed out the knots in my hair, put on the blouse and skirt I’d stolen from a Laundromat, and knocked on every apartment door I could find. I got the job by answering a newspaper ad that asked only for my money, and in return I received a brochure, two order books, and a pink sample case that carried all things pretty. Just looking at the samples made me want to wash my hands. Eye shadows came in tiny disks, looking like sour candies, lipsticks grew from towers of gold, and mini bottles of foundation stood perfectly straight and guarded the six shades of blush that lived in large metal squares. All the pieces fit so perfectly in their slots, as if they belonged there and nowhere else.

  Avon was supposed to be my ticket out. I wanted to get straight. Save up money and get a place. I wasn’t the best salesgirl but I liked the job—I liked being inside people’s homes because there I wasn’t pregnant, I wasn’t a runaway, I wasn’t using. With the makeup on I became a new version of me—a well-mannered Korean girl, who sat with her legs crossed in living rooms decorated with plastic-covered couches and plastic-
covered lampshades. I smiled often. I spoke softly. I sold to housewives.

  At first they’d act as if their schedules couldn’t possibly include me, but within minutes they were showing me their wedding photos, the warts on their toes, the strands of foreign hair they’d found on their husbands’ sweaters. They whined about rainy vacations or their selfish in-laws or how the pearls they’d gotten for Christmas didn’t match the ones from Mother’s Day. They pulled out dresses they’d bought and tried them on, and I said nothing about their asses looking like old pillows. I presented the benefits of hypoallergenics and how Bahamas Berry Blush could turn back their clocks. They recited the plotlines of All My Children and asked if I thought their no-good husbands were cheating on them. I said no because that was what they wanted to hear. And I said yes because that was what they wanted to hear.

  Some purchased out of guilt. Some wasted my time. They’d talk to me as if I were their best friend, but when it came time to open their wallets, they dug their fingers in the samples, chewed on my pen, spilled coffee on my case, and used my order forms to jot down telephone messages, only to tell me at the very end that what they really needed was to go on a diet instead of buying cosmetics. Then go on a fucking diet, I’d think and take something of theirs before I left—a music box, a photo, a wedding ring stuck in a soap dish.

  This was my last building for the night. I knocked on a door even though dinnertime had long passed.

  “Who is it?” a boy asked. He sounded ten or eleven.

  “It’s the Avon Lady.”

  “What?”

  “The Avon Lady,” I shouted into the crack of the door, probably loud enough for the whole building to hear.

  “You’re kidding. Hey, Ma! Guess what! It’s the Avon Lady, like the commercials!” The boy laughed at his joke.